Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering if California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s mammoth and apparently endless ad campaign would eventually backfire on her among voters tired of seeing her every time they turn on the tube. Now there’s some evidence the backlash could be developing very early in the 2010 cycle.
Rasmussen released a new California poll today, and most of the attention will be paid to the topline finding that has Jerry Brown reopening a 6-point lead over eMeg; the last two Rasmussen polls had them tied.
But what I find more interesting is that Whitman’s negatives seem to be spiking pretty fast. A Rasmussen poll in February had her favorable/unfavorable ratio at 56/28. A mid-March Rasmussen poll placed the ratio at 51/34. Now it’s at 47/43. And that’s during a period when she’s pretty much had the airwaves to herself, with the exception of a recent Steve Poizner ad blitz that rarely even mentions Whitman (and then just calls her a “liberal”).
Meanwhile, Whitman’s general election opponent, that ultimate known quantity, Jerry Brown, has a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 51/42. It’s pretty interesting that Brown built up his negatives over a period of forty years. With Whitman, it’s more like forty days. At this rate, she’s going to be one of the more unpopular people in California by the time she faces primary voters in June, and assuming she wins that one, it’s a long time til November.

On Monday I reported on an exchange I had with RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost on my contention that the political landscape is likely to get a lot rockier for Republicans in 2012, no matter how well they do this November.
I don’t want to keep this exchange going perpetually, but Jay’s last update raises two issues that I want to mention before turning the page. First, he quite rightly argues that the governing record of the Obama administration, and the policy and message response of the GOP, could have at least as large an impact on 2012 as the demographic factors I stressed in my original piece. No question that is true, and that’s the sort of thing I write about here nearly every day. But I don’t get the sense that Republicans are paying much attention to the changes in landscape that are going to occur semi-automatically as we move from a midterm to a presidential cycle–changes that will complicate every step they take. And that was the main point of my Salon article, which was by no means some sort of definitive personal manifesto on everything related to the 2012 elections.
But Cost makes an argument on another question where I am much less inclined to agree with him: How likely it is that a “dark horse” will emerge in 2012 to revolutionize the Republican presidential field? Sure, again, anything’s possible, particularly this far from Election Day 2012. But as I observed in my original piece, presidential campaigns these days almost have to develop long in advance, particularly for “dark horses” who have to establish name ID, raise a lot of money, and then perform the ritual of semi-residence in early primary and caucus states. (I suspect there may be some understandable confusion on Jay’s part based on the assumption that I was arguing that various “dark horse” candidates would be poor general election candidates, but my main contention was that Republicans had a weak field of leading candidates, and that none of the dark horses had the chops to get the nomination).
Jay thinks my lukewarm assessment of lesser-known potential Republican presidential candidates like John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence and Tim Pawlenty is just a matter of partisan bias. He even makes the (to me) astonishing statement that Thune’s appeal is no more superficial than Barack Obama’s in 2008 (which I’d say reflects more than a little partisan bias). So let’s think about what makes a “dark horse” candidate formidable, at a time when there are no kingmakers to pluck a Warren Harding out of obscurity and lift him to the nomination. I’d say the minimum qualifications are one if not more than one of the following qualities: exceptional public renown; special identification with a major cause or new ideology; a particular appeal to important and previously underrepresented constituencies; a remarkable public personality; or a novel approach to presidential candidacy. To some extent, dark horses these days, unless they just get lucky, need a candidacy that is in some respect historic. Giant fountains of money also help, though none of the people being “mentioned” as dark horses in 2012 are named Michael Bloomberg. Geography can matter, too, but that’s usually not dispositive unless a candidate’s geographical origins are somehow “historic” or unique.
So let’s look at Cost’s list of potentially formidable 2012 dark horses with those criteria in mind. John Thune is a minor legend in Republican insider circles because he narrowly won a GOTV-driven slugfest in the heavily Republican state of South Dakota in 2004, thus beating Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. This was a testament to Thune’s personal attractivenss, durability, and willingness to toe the party line, but these are not typically the qualities that vault someone from obscurity to a presidential nomination. So far as I can tell, he is not particularly known for any policy positions, issues, or personification of any underrepresented constituency group or geographical grouping. Yes, he is broadly acceptable to every major element of the GOP, but “acceptability” is a quality that matters only when one is no longer a dark horse, and in any event, who isn’t “acceptable” in these days of monochromatic conservative uniformity in the GOP? That is also the problem of Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, were he to run for president. He’s a guy beloved of movement conservative types for representing the movement conservative point-of-view in the House GOP Caucus. But are self-conscious “movement conservatives” really a voting faction in the GOP nominating process, and are they so aggrieved by the rest of the field that they will coalesece around Pence? There’s no particular reason to think so.
Mitch Daniels is another insider heart-throb, in no small part because he was a major Washington figure as OMB Director under Bush 43, and then successfully took his act mainstream by being elected and then re-elected governor of a usually Republican state where Republican statewide candidates have often struggled. I can see the argument that Daniels’ resume equips him to become the symbol of the suddenly preeminent conservative issue of fiscal discipline (though oppo researchers would have great sport with his responsibility for Bush budget deficits). But again: is that a quality that so separates him from the field that he can make it his own? And does he have other personal or representational characteristics that could give him the rock-star aura to come out of national obscurity, and, say, win the Iowa Caucuses? Maybe, but the evidence of that isn’t obvious.
And then there’s Tim Paw, and it is true that he coined a very interesting and serviceable slogan in talking about “Sam’s Club Republicans.” It is also true, as Jay notes, that Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat turned that slogan into a pretty unorthodox agenda for the GOP–so unorthodox, in fact, that it was generally rejected or ignored by conservatives, aside from its very orthodox endorsement of tax subsidies for marriage and child-bearing. But that has little or nothing to do with Pawlenty, who has been conventionally conservative in his proto-presidential campaign, and whose Big Idea seems to be the ancient and completely symbolic chesnut of a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Is there anything about these putative “dark horses” that makes any of them particularly stand out, other than as “acceptable” alternatives to the front-runners if one of them happens to get a one-on-one contest? I don’t see it. And there’s certainly nothing about any of them that is comparable to the Democratic “dark horses” that Jay Cost cites in his own piece: John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Kennedy was the first serious Catholic candidate for president since Al Smith; Carter was the first serious Deep South candidate since the Civil War; Clinton ran aggressively against the pieties of his own party; and Obama became a huge national celebrity as a state senator and went on to beat a legendary Democrat in virtually all-white Iowa.
Until someone emerges on the fringes of the Republican presidential field who can truly separate him- or herself from the field, anyone is entitled to some serious skepticism about the faith of many Republicans that they’ll wind up with a presidential candidate who doesn’t share the handicaps of the established field.
As for the weakness of that established field, check out Nate Silver’s 538.com post that comments on my exchange with Jay Cost and offers some objective evidence that the elephants running in 2012 don’t quite match the donkeys who ran in 2008.

Few subjects create as much controversy as that of race, and that’s particularly true of any discussion of race and the 44th President of the United States. So it’s of considerable interest that the ever-estimable David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, has penned a new biography of Barack Obama, entitled The Bridge, that is focused primarily on Obama’s role as a major figure in the history of American race relations.
For those interested in this topic, I’ve written a pretty lengthy review of Remnick’s book for the Washington Monthly. I conclude that the racial conflicts raised and addressed by Obama’s rise to the White House remain, unfortunately, relevant to his presidency. I’m sure my review will eventually be added to the long list of material that conservatives object to as raising what they call “the race card.” Too bad.

Beginning tomorrow, and proceeding for as long as it takes, TDS will be featuring a special online forum on the subject of “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom.” This forum is cosponsored by the major progressive intellectual center Demos, and by TDS, and will feature some exciting and important voices in the progressive community. The discussion will focus not only on the enduring values of the progressive persuasion in U.S. politics, but on how they can be applied and communicated in the present political environment. Please stay closely tuned.

If you are a progressive political junkie, odds are that one of the most depressing features of your week is the release of new polls from Scott Rasmussen. By and large, the ubiquitous robo-calling firm yields results that are more encouraging to Republicans than others (e.g., the big advantage it shows for the GOP in the generic congressional ballot), and the sheer weight of its state polling can be mind-numbing and spirit-sapping.
It’s generally been thought that this “house effect” of Rasmussen polls is the result of the early and stringent use of “likely voter” screens, which tend to produce a more conservative electorate. According to that theory, the “house effect” would be reduced as we get closer to election day and people make up their minds whether or not they are going to vote (this also accords with Rasmussen’s good record of final-days accuracy in in recent elections).
But Nate Silver, as is his habit, takes a closer look at Rasmussen’s operations, and reaches a different conclusion: the raw sample Rasmussen uses before applying a “likely voter” screen seems to bear a “house effect” as well:

Although Rasmussen rarely reveals results for its entire adult sample, rather than that of likely voters, there is one notable exception: its monthly tracking of partisan identification, for which it publishes its results among all adults. Since Labor Day, Rasmussen polls have shown Democrats with a 3.7-point identification advantage among all adults, on average. This is the smallest margin for the Democrats among any of 16 pollsters who have published results on this question, who instead show a Democratic advantage ranging from 5.2 to 13.0 points, with an average of 9.6.

Why would that happen? Nate doesn’t suggest any deliberate bias by Rasmussen; but the firm does use polling techniques that tend to skew the sample:

Raw polling data is pretty dirty. If you just call people up and see who answers the phone, you will tend to get too many women, too many old people, and too many white people. This is especially the case if you rely on a landline sample without a supplement of cellphone voters.
Pollsters try to correct for these deficiencies in a variety of ways. They may use household selection procedures (for instance, asking to speak with the person who has the next birthday). They may leave their poll in the field for several days, calling back when they do not contact their desired respondent. An increasing number may call cellphones in addition to landlines.
Rasmussen does not appear to do any of these things. Their polls are in the field for only one night, leaving little or no time for callbacks. They do not call cellphones. They do not appear to use within-household selection procedures. In addition, their polls use an automated script rather than a live interviewer, which tends to be associated with a lower response rate and which might exacerbate these problems. So Rasmussen’s raw data is likely dirtier than most.

Add in the likelihood that Republican voters are a bit more enthusiastic about reporting their views to pollsters at present, and you can see how Rasmussen’s “house effect” could be baked right into the cake. But if that’s true, the assumption that Rasmussen’s numbers will get more reliable as we approach election day may be questionable as well. Silver thinks the Rasmussen “house effect” is a new development that has emerged during this election cycle. So, too, may be a pattern of inaccuracy unless the firm takes corrective action.
Thus, Democrats are not necessarily exhibiting their own biases by taking Rasmussen’s results with a large grain of salt or mentally shifting the numbers leftward a few points. That’s an inexact science, but so, too, is polling.

Over at The New Republic today, Noam Scheiber is a lot more certain than I was yesterday about the likelihood that Republicans are going to lose their fight against financial regulation and pay a price for their obstruction and obfuscation while they are at it. For one thing, they are struggling to keep their own senators in line. And for another–and this will be a refreshing change of pace for progressives concerned about how health reform devolved–the dynamics of White House-congressional interaction on financial regulation are actually pushing the bill in a more, not less, progressive direction:

The reason the recent developments are so remarkable is that all reforms tend to weaken as they get closer to passage, as legislators hash out compromises with powerful interests in order to secure a deal. Bizarrely, financial reform appears to be headed in the opposite direction. When it comes to derivatives, at least, the bill Senator Chris Dodd moved through his Banking Committee in March was significantly tougher than the bill the House passed in December. Then, last week, Lincoln shocked Wall Street by producing an even tougher bill than that. “This thing is not a battle they’d anticipated,” says one administration official.

Scheiber attributes this trend to strong pressure from the White House, which is making senators like Lincoln look to other Democrats for support instead of offering early compromises to Republicans.
Speaking of Republicans, the macho bluster that usually accompanies their obstructionist tactics seems to be missing with financial regulation:

The one tactical question Democrats do agree on is that the GOP is ready to crumple. Last week much was made of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s success at getting all 41 Republicans to sign a letter of opposition to the current Dodd bill. But Democratic Senate aides have been privately mocking the letter’s mealy-mouthed language, which is carefully parsed to afford its signees maximum wiggle room. “There’s no explicit threat to vote against [opening debate],” scoffs one senior Democratic aide. “It pledges to continue negotiating.”

Scheiber predicts that Democrats will eventually offer Republicans a face-saving compromise, but not right away:

[F]or the moment, the White House seems happier to make the banks and the GOP squirm. “Probably the way it’s playing out … [we’d] make them vote a bunch of times against [a tough bill], then compromise. You’d still have a strong enough bill, but peel off five to ten votes to get it done.” The idea is to force Republicans to pay a price for their reflexive opposition–“make them actually block it, not just say they’re going to block it”–before you finally throw them a lifeline.

If that’s right, this fight could actually produce not only a better bill on the merits than anyone really expected, but a much-needed political victory for the White House and congressional Democrats. This may be the only issue in sight where Senate Republicans take a real beating while being forced to back down, but it’s certainly an issue that Democrats would love to hang around their necks like an albatross.

So the Senate is preparing for a vote to debate financial regulation legislation, and a partisan slugfest with potentially large electoral consequences is fully underway.
Democrats hope they have gotten Republicans into a tight space that will finally make them accountable for the contradiction between pro-corporate policies and populist rhetoric. The GOP, with its anti-bailout rhetoric, has already worked hard to make voters forget that TARP and other financial community bailouts were their own party’s idea, imposed by their own president and supported by their own party’s congressional leadership. But since their opposition to tough regulation of the financial sector is a lot less ambiguous than their opposition to bailouts, its opposition to the present legislation poses more than a small problem, since even voters who aren’t crazy about government regulation of the private sector generally are largely in favor regulation of the financial sector.
The GOP’s solution has been to oppose regulation as–surprise, surprise–bailouts! That’s why the White House is reportedly pushing for the removal of a “liquidation fund” from the bill that was the only real connection in reality to the Republican claims that it would create “endless bailouts.” Moreover, Democrats have made a lot of hay out of meetings between Wall Street potentates and GOP Members of Congress, who have created a more-or-less united front against the regulatory initiative.
The latest twist and turn in this war of words is also pretty interesting: instead of denying their strategerizing with Wall Street, Republican congressional leaders are simply claiming that Democrats take money from Wall Street, too! The fairly transparent aim here is to muddy the waters, reinforce preexisting public perceptions that both parties are in bed with Wall Street, and then count on general anger with “Washington” to give them victory in November.
It’s a pretty cynical but rational strategy, but it’s not clear it will survive a Republican filibuster against the main tangible effort to regulate Wall Street since the financial collapsse, much less a protracted fight between now and November. Certainly Democrats have a big stake in blowing away the smoke and exposing the real positions of the GOP on financial regulation, and needless to say, in going the extra mile in keeping their own political petticoats clean and starchy on this subject.

For those Democrats looking for a little political sunshine on the horizon, I wrote an essay published by Salon over the weekend that examined reasons for Democratic optimism and Republican caution that will emerge once the midterm elections are over.
I made three basic points: (1) the very turnout patterns that will help Republicans in 2010 will likely be reversed in 2012, with the current GOP focus on appealing to older white voters becoming a handicap rather than an advantage; (2) for all the talk of “fresh faces” emerging from the midterms, it is extremely unlikely that any of them will emerge quickly enough to run for president as Republicans in 2012; and (3) the existing Republican presidential field is at least as weak as the 2008 field, and could produce a weak nominee. That’s all totally aside from the facts that the economy could improve by 2012, that the president remains relatively popular, and that Republicans may be unable to offer a credible alternative agenda for the country.
While I was by no means making any predictions for 2012, I did provoke a cranky response from RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost, who fired back a post suggesting I didn’t much know what I was talking about. Why? Because, well, young voters might trend Republican (since they did back in the 1980s), Republicans might amass enough “angry white voters” to overwhelm the rest of the electorate in 2012, and Democrats have nominated “dark horses” before so it’s ludicrous for any Democrats to suggest Republicans can’t do the same in 2012.
Lordy, lordy, so much heat in response to a piece mainly suggesting that Republicans should try to curb their enthusiasm–a suggestion that Cost himself has often made to those in both parties who see every positive development as augering a divinely dictated permanent majority. Yes, Jay is right, anything’s possible. Young voters may do a 180-degree turn in their political attitudes between 2008 and 2012, but it’s unlikely. Yes, it is always possible to amass a large enough lead in one demographic category to win any given election, but it’s doesn’t happen often, and it’s a particularly perilous strategy when that category is gradually shrinking as an element of the electorate. And no, I don’t know, just as he doesn’t know, who the Republican nominee for president is going to be in 2012.
But Jay doesn’t deny my most basic point that the well-known age disparties in midterm versus presidential turnout happen, at this moment in political history, to be helping Republicans disproportionately in 2010, and could accordingly disappear as an advantage, and even become a disadvantage, in 2012. Republicans like Jay need to think about that, and not just complain that the observation isn’t a scientific prediction.
As for the presidential field, I was actually making two separate points that Cost seems to conflate: the first is that the loose talk about “fresh faces” emerging from the current cycle and brushing aside the early GOP field is a dangerous delusion; it rarely if ever happens, and didn’t happen in the four elections Jay cites as counter-examples. He’s on stronger ground suggesting that “dark horses” (not “fresh faces”) could emerge, but doesn’t deal with any of the specific problems I mention about the currently available “dark horses,” other than to mock them. And yes, it’s possible that Pawlenty’s Sam’s Club Republican bit will finally catch on. Maybe insider enthusiasm for Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels will become communicable to actual voters outside Indiana. Perhaps Rick Perry and Jim DeMint aren’t as crazy-sounding to swing voters as they sound to Democrats. But if I were a Republican, I would be a mite more worried than Cost seems to be about my weak presidential field, and a mite less confident that weak fields somehow magically produce strong “dark horses.”
The bottom line is that the natural GOP tendency to extrapolate a good, or even very good 2010 to a good 2012 misses some pretty basic problems that could plague today’s high-riding party before too long. And if you don’t believe me, ask former President Bob Dole.